Companies are increasingly casting their net worldwide when looking for members of staff, even at a junior level. A recruitment crisis in the NHS for example has led to trusts across the UK looking overseas to recruit doctors, nurses and other health professionals. It goes without saying that a high level of background checking is always required for people working in healthcare, but how do you check the background of someone who has never set foot in the UK? Many employers wrongly assume that they can just take their background screening processes and apply them overseas. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case.

Local Laws and Restrictions

Perhaps the best piece of advice for anyone wishing to do background checks on overseas workers is to contact expert help and get them on the case. If you do wish to manage the process yourself, or just understand more about what it involves, the key point is that every country has its own rules, law and culture determining what information you can access, and how. In larger countries such as the United States, restrictions can even vary from state to state. In some regions of the world, such as the UK and the European Union, we have GDPR legislation which sets out very clearly what information can be accessed, the process for accessing it, and what permission you must get from the prospective employee. Other areas of the world have similar laws, but don’t fall into the trap of assuming that the restrictions and processes will be similar to those you may be familiar with.

Criminal Record Checking

Checks through the Disclosure and Barring Service, or DBS checks, are standard for anyone working in the NHS and other healthcare roles. The DBS can only run checks on people living in the UK, so when recruiting overseas staff, an equivalent check will need to be done in the home country. This poses its own issues with language barriers, and differing terminology talking about police certificates, good conduct certificates or similar. In some regions, very little information is digitised, and obtaining a police check for a new hire might mean writing letters, manual searches through registers and paperwork, and waiting for a reply in the post. This can all add several weeks, if not months, to agreeing a start date for a new worker.

Cultural Considerations

We are all familiar with background screening in the UK, and it is also common practice in North America and most of Europe. In Japan however, it is not standard to ask candidates to prove where they live by providing utility bills or bank statements. Credit referencing is generally not required for anyone working in the healthcare industry but might be for people working in banks or financial services. Laws about checking someone’s financial history vary even more than laws about checking criminal history. Privacy legislation in many countries mean it is impossible to get more than the most basic information, so this is something to take into account when hiring staff where a detailed check is usually required.